NEW YORK Dave Winer, a pioneer of an online journal format known as Web logs, thought he was doing people a favor by hosting 3,000 of such blogs for free.
So he was taken aback this week when he endured a barrage of criticism for deciding to stop the free service — an episode that reveals deep passions about blogging.
Winer launched his first Web log in 1997 and began hosting other people’s blogs in 2000, when he headed UserLand Software, a Web publishing company.
After UserLand dropped the service to focus on selling blogging-related tools, Winer bought some servers and offered free hosting on Weblogs.com, a site that also tracks blogs hosted elsewhere, making it an important blogging hub.
Eventually Winer, now a research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, found that running the free service took too much time and energy, especially because he has health problems that he declined to discuss. He closed the free blogs Sunday.